My colleague, Teran Andes, US Practice Leader, Procurement and Operations Advisory, Health Care Life Sciences at KPMG, wrote a compelling article on the significant cost savings and benefits of implementing a spend management solution for the meeting and event category.
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“It’s a dirty little secret of meeting and events planning business, but M&E organizations are driven by throwing the “best event ever”. That being said, it is highly likely that at the end of the day planners will not have a full and detailed grasp of how much was spent and what, at a very granular level, is needed for the next event.
It may seem surprising that meeting and events planners may not realize what they are spending such an enormous sum of money on. The challenge they face is that meeting plans change so much from plan to execution and the cost of change is buried in venue and hotel invoices with virtually no level of detail. The priority of meeting and events planners is to pull off the “best event ever” without participants being made aware of the mechanics behind it.
Meeting and events spend, has a lot of moving parts and levels of visibility. There is spend such as AV, transportation, catering and lodging, plus cost of emergency items. Event planners are focused on maximizing the attendee experience at the expense of the annual meetings and events budget. As procurement professionals – we can’t help event planners source the best portfolio of products and services, because it is very challenging to understand, at a detailed level, what was bought and whether the pricing, markups and rebates were appropriate.
Without visibility into this spend, Procurement finds it difficult to properly partner with their peers in Meeting and Events to help them deliver the “best event ever” while maximizing and extending their overall annual budget.
These issues can be addressed through enhanced processes designed to capture the meeting spend up front, manage the change process throughout, communicate easily with suppliers, and streamline the process from budget set-up to final payment and settlement.”
